Story Highlights

James Fleming Parker never much cared about the finer points of the law, especially those pertaining to the ownership of cattle.

But he knew and appreciated good horses.

So he was understandably upset when a train killed a couple of his ponies that had wandered onto the tracks. He was even more upset when the Atlantic & Pacific railroad offered him a skimpy settlement.

That, he figured, left him no choice. The only way to make things even would be to rob one of its trains.

Like a lot of Westerners, Parker had a tough life. He was born in 1865 in Visalia, Calif. His mother died when he was 10; his father committed suicide four years later. By the time Parker was 15, he'd been sentenced to a term in San Quentin State Prison for stealing cattle.

Afterward, he bounced back and forth between Arizona and California. He was good with horses and often worked as a wrangler. But he continued to have a casual attitude about the law and wound up serving another term in San Quentin for burglary.

During one of his stays in Arizona, Parker apparently became acquainted with George Ruffner, who later became Prescott's most revered lawman. One account says Parker took part, along with Ruffner, in the rodeo of July 4, 1888, which Prescott claims is the world's first.

Eventually, Parker fell in with a gang known for swiping cattle across northern Arizona and selling them in Nevada.

It was around this time that Parker figured the railroad was practically forcing him to become a train robber. So, with an accomplice from the gang, he held up an Atlantic & Pacific train near Peach Springs on Feb. 8, 1897.

It did not go well.

His accomplice was shot and killed; Parker hightailed it out of there without the loot he'd planned to grab.

He was arrested about a week later and taken to the Yavapai County jail in Prescott where, supposedly, many of the townsfolk were sympathetic to his anger at the railroad. But rather than take his chances with a trial, Parker and two other inmates overpowered and disarmed a guard on May 9. And when Assistant District Attorney Erasmus Lee Norris came downstairs to see what all the commotion was, Parker shot him.

Norris, 29, died that night, and whatever sympathy folks may have had for Parker vanished.

A posse nabbed him May 23, and before long Parker was on a train back to Prescott, where he was convicted of killing Norris and sentenced to hang.

So many stories have grown up around Parker over the years that it's not easy to separate fact from fiction. True or not, though, some of those stories bear repeating.

One of them has it that on the night before his long-delayed execution, Parker asked a final favor from Ruffner: Would he allow Flossie, a sporting girl well known along Whiskey Row, to comfort Parker before the morrow's final tribulation?

Ruffner, according to the story, dutifully made the arrangements.

Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't.

What's certain is that the next morning, June 3, 1898, Ruffner walked Parker to the gallows on the east side of the courthouse.

Up on the scaffold, Parker shook hands with everyone and asked the jailer to tell the other prisoners that he "died game and like a man."

Per Parker's request, Ruff­ner himself placed the black hood over his head. The sheriff also drove the hearse that took his old acquaintance to a modest grave in Citizens Cemetery on Sheldon Street.